Breaking From Bad
by Indigo2831
Summary: Takes place after "Pac-Man Fever." Sam is getting sicker. Dean feels helpless, and Dean Winchester doesn't do helpless. Brotherly bonding abounds.


**Hi, everyone! I've been writing a ton, and while I do have some bigger stories in the works, I wanted to write something smaller and more intimate. This particular little bunny would not leave me alone. Please let me know what you think.**

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**Breaking From Bad**

Dean Winchester would liken himself to many people—Batman, James Bond, and after a few too many whiskey sours, Captain Jack Sparrow—but at this moment, it would have to be a teenage girl.

Well, a really badass, hot teenage girl who had her own dungeon, firing range and an arsenal.

He never thought it would come to this: that his very sanity depended on a single phone call from a man, but it was Dean's new reality. Due to Sam's declining health, the Winchesters had abandoned small-time hunts to focus solely on closing the gates of hell. Consequently, Dean's nesting had quickly morphed into cabin fever and now careened towards anxiety.

Dean lowered his gun, his hand buzzing from the recoil, and pretended to scrutinize the slightly uneven clustering of the bullet holes in the paper target. It was two inches off-center, a horrendous performance for a hunter who'd started shooting before he'd lost all his baby teeth. He was only delaying the inevitable, so he swiped up cell phone to check for new calls. Sadly, it had only been six minutes since the last time he'd looked, and there was nothing. Growling, he backed away from the shooting range, its floor studded with the dulled metal of spent shells. As much as he wanted to continue target practice, he was wasting perfectly good bullets that should be embedded in monsters.

He wandered around the bunker, hating its sameness. Because as much as Dean loved having an epic bunker to come home too, it lost its perks when you had nowhere else to go. The restlessness itched beneath his skin like a disease.

"Come on, Garth." He prayed the strange little hunter would deliver him a big, killable monster with a bow on it.

Dean wasn't surprised to find Sam hunched over the laptop in the library, a cart loaded with strange instruments and tools to his left. They were both proud enough not to acknowledge that researching and cataloging was Sam's way of admitting that he didn't feel up for doing much else. Dean's stomach dropped with sympathy because while Sam's body was breaking down, those impressive muscles wasting away from the trials, his mind was still whirred at 1,000 percent.

Dean sat down at the table, leg bouncing mightily beneath it. "Whatcha doin?" He asked, poking at Sam's stuff.

He was awarded a frown and a huff of irritation, and Dean grinned. Some things would never change, no matter how sick Sam was.

"Cataloging the weapons room."

Dean made a sour face and then a farting noise. "Boring."

Sam lifted his arm, producing something that looked like an ancient clarinet. "Go play with that. Leave me alone."

He took it, peering down the hole in the larger end.

Without taking his eyes of the screen, Sam grabbed his hand, turning it sideways. "What part of 'weapon room' did you not hear?"

"I'm sorry but I doubt Napoleon's flute can hurt me, Sammy."

"It's not a flute, it's a Culverin."

Dean blinked at him.

"A medieval gun, dufus."

"Seriously?" Dean held it with the caution it deserved, curiosity overriding his disquiet. "How do I fire it?"

"Go figure it out. I'm almost done with Lot D." Sam bargained. He slid a pouch across the table. "Gun powder."

"Sweet."

The culverin pacified Dean for about ten minutes after he'd singed the tips of his fingers and managed to scare some birds from the reflexive cussing and hopping around, not from the actual calamity of the firearm. Sparklers had more kickback than the rudimentary weapon.

He headed back into the lair, shoulders slumped, and busied himself by reheating some chili that had seen better days. Sam ducked into the kitchen, looking unwell and unkempt in the soft knits he'd slept in and an old bathrobe Dean suspected was Bobby's. "I'm gonna lay down."

Dean's gut twisted when Sam braced himself against the doorway, face pinched. "Yeah, sure, Sammy. Rest up."

His brother slinked away.

The chili went back into the fridge with a jerk and a slam. Maybe it was selfish and uncaring, but he couldn't take stand it anymore. Watching Sam's tedious decline from a sun-blotting brunette Thor to a wasted husk of a man was worse than any torture he'd endured both topside or on the rack. The bitter irony was that Dean defined himself as being a big brother and a warrior, and closing the gates of hell had essentially kept him from doing both. He hadn't been able to protect his brother from yet another one of the universe's obstacle courses, and he was now sidelined from the fight he'd dragged Sam into. He was helpless in a way he hadn't understood until now.

Dean Winchester didn't do helpless.

He dialed Garth and growled the second he answered, "Time's up, man, gimme a hunt. I don't care what it is. Hell, I'll kill Santa Claus right now if the price was right."

"Slow your roll, Deano." Garth said. "I got a line somethin' but it's more than a day's drive and I'm not even sure what it is yet. It could be anything from a mountain lion to a werewolf. I need more deets."

Dean rolled his eyes. "I ain't exactly popping my cherry here. I've been hunting longer than you've been shavin'. Gimme your intel and I'll try to suss it out on my own."

"Fine, fine, ya idjit." Garth gave him the rundown: mutilated bodies, Midwestern location. All found in or near forests and camping sites.

Dean practically vibrated for the kill. "That's not a werewolf...the cycles wrong. If it's anything, it's a hodag or a wendigo. Thanks, Garth."

When you'd lived as a nomad for the better part of thirty years, packing came down economical choreography, and Dean was zipped his duffel in less than five minutes.

He deserved a reprieve, Dean thought as he all but ran out of the bunker. Saving lives would be the icing on the cake. And if he had to stare at these walls for another minute longer or watch Sam try to discreetly hork up blood, not try to catch him when his legs gave out, Dean would have some sort of episode.

Dean paused outside Sam's room. His brother lay on his side, hands in limp fists by his face, half-swaddled in blankets like he'd dropped off before he could adequately tuck in. Even so, his brother was out cold. Sam's comforter was a puffy blue one with a giant red and gold Superman emblem in the center. Dean had found it on a clearance in the big box store two towns over, and couldn't resist. It was similar to a superhero sleeping bag a ten-year-old Sam had coveted on a rare shopping trip at a department store. John had callously shut down his begging, and Sam had trailed silently behind Dean while they finished shopping, wiping at his suspiciously crimson cheeks. On the way home, Dean had promised to get him a better one. Twenty years later, he finally had. And it had been worth it to see Sam's expression of baffled awe when he dug it out of the trunk.

Dean pulled it over his shoulders. Pressing a hand to his forehead revealed that his brother was simmering with fever. More than that, Sam grimaced at the touch, new lines of pain bracketing his mouth.

The sickness from the trials was a nasty one that ferreted into Sam's body, laying waste to it in a variety of ways. The symptoms changed almost daily. Some days, his breathing was reduced to a pained wheeze and the coughing was broken and bloody. Others he was so nauseated, he dry-heaved at the slightest shift in the air. If it was a good day, Sam only mentioned an irksome weariness.

Gently, he nudged Sam's shoulder. It took a moment, but Sam's eyes slitted open and flickered to Dean. "Wha'? Garth come through?"

"Yeah. It's just a quick hunt a few states over. My gut says it's a hodag but I won't know 'til I get out there."

"Could be a berserker...take iron rounds. Be safe, all right?"

He should have been relieved that Sam hadn't forced himself out of bed even though he looked like deep-fried misery, and insisted on backing Dean up. He should have been reassured that Sam was listening to his body and resting, so he could get better. But he wasn't.

He was terrified.

Sam's fists clenched.

"Hey, you okay?"

He cleared his throat to mutter, "…aches."

"Where?"

"Everywhere...even friggin' my skin hurts." Sam complained. "Get...get the covers off."

The mystery of the missing blankets was solved. Dean pushed them off gingerly, inwardly wincing when Sam hissed at the scrape of the sheets on his bare arm.

Dean plucked a bottle from the nightstand cluttered with them and tapped out two caplets. "You want the heavy artillery?"

"...already took 'em." Sam grinded his face into the pillow, body tensing. "You can go," he muttered into the cotton, "Just gonna sleep this off."

"Are you sure?"

Sam forced his eyes open. "I know you, man. Go kill somethin'."

He left with reluctance, but his guilt lessened with every step to the car, every mile down the freeway, because Sam had given his blessing. He had been on Sam-watch for weeks, noting every milestone of his deterioration. He needed a break from the bad. He yearned for one day to wield his gun, use his strength and toss a little good into the world.

Cranking up the Metallica—something he hadn't been able to do for months because of Sam's headaches—and opened his baby up on the road, letting her stretch her wheels, the engine thunder him towards the horizon.

Dean made it fifty-three glorious miles before turning around.

The desk lamp was still on his Sam's bedroom when he returned, a welcome change from the harsh wash or the fluorescent lights that ran throughout the bunker. The blue comforter had been kicked off the bed, spilling over the side like a discarded cape. His brother was curled up, knees drawn up to his chest, face mashed into the mattress. His right arm was limply wrapped around his stomach, but his left was bent at the elbow, standing vertically.

"Sammy?"

As he moved closer, Dean could see the left arm trembling, the hand of lax fingers rocking like a flag of surrender.

Folding a hand gently over Sam's forehead to check for fever elicited a bitten-off mewl that had Dean grinding his teeth together in sympathy. Sam had had fingernails ripped from their beds, been slashed at the wrists and bled like game, been mentally and physically tortured by Lucifer, and had never succumbed like this. This was insidious pain, and there was no way in hell Sam was going to suffer it alone.

Dean dialed Garth and was relieved when he got his voicemail. "False alarm on the hunt, man. I'm not going to be able to make it to Wisconsin. Pass it off to whoever's closest."

He took his jacket off, folding it over the overflowing bookcase and pulled up a chair.

It was another twenty minutes of restless stirring and quiet broken gurgles of pain before Sam woke up. "...hunt over already?" He asked groggily.

"Never made it. The pills aren't working, are they?"

Sam's hand kneaded his stomach, twisting the drenched cotton of his shirt. "They do...jus' not for very long 'cause the pain moves, changes shape."

"Sounds like a job for Jim Beam."

Sam grunted and flopped on his back, Adam's apple bobbing in a telltale rhythm that Dean knew well.

He managed to skirt around the bed with the trashcan a second before Sam began to retch. "Easy, Sammy, easy." Dean moved to push the curling, dark strands out of hair out of his face, but Sam flinched away.

"D-don't touch me...hurts."

"I won't. Wipe your mouth, okay?"

Sam acquiesced.

And they stayed like that, Dean awkwardly hunched near the edge of the mattress, hands stuffed in his pockets so he wouldn't be tempted to offer tactile comfort and Sam absorbing the pain, its power tremoring his hands and curling his toes.

It was an intimate kind of torture Dean, and he loathed every second.

"You should go on the hunt," Sam insisted, breathing roughly through his nose. "Nothin' you can do anyway." Dean knew Sam was ashamed and possibly embarrassed. Pride was one of the Winchesters' favorite sins.

He hadn't returned because of some brotherly duty that was hardwired into him by genetics, John Winchester or some sense of misplaced guilt. He'd come back because he loved his brother, and Dean had vowed to carry him through this, and no matter how damaging it was for Dean, it was _happening to Sam_.

He knelt down and rested his chin on his folded arms on the edge of the mattress. "I'm here, Sammy, okay? I know it's not much but I'm here."

Sam painstakingly angled his body towards Dean's. A lone finger slipped inside the cuff of Dean's sleeve. The sigh Sam gave was from more relief than pain, and told Dean that it was everything.

_Fin_


End file.
